I matched 21,000 house sales against 3,300 duplex sales to settle whether house hacking actually beats buying a house. Here's the method and the result. Everybody has an opinion on this and almost nobody has run it on equal terms, so I tried to build the comparison carefully. Tell me where it bre...
I matched 828 St. Paul small multifamily buildings that sold twice since 2012, and here's what the owners actually made. Most appreciation numbers are averages of different properties in different years, which means changes in the mix of what sold get counted as changes in value. Repeat sales avo...
I analyzed 10,925 duplex, triplex and fourplex sales to test whether St. Paul's rent control hurt values, and the results surprised me. This is a long post, but I think the methodology matters more than the headline, so I'm showing my work. Tell me what I got wrong. BACKGROUND St. Paul passed ren...
Everyone in real estate says "buy in the off-season." I wanted to know if the data actually backs it up. So I pulled 4,896 single-family sales across Highland Park, Mac-Groveland, Union Park and West 7th - six years, October 2020 through September 2026 - and measured what buyers actually paid rel...
Any new investors friendly groups or meet ups in the Twin cities? Would love to connect with people in the space
I was reading a Wall Street Journal article this weekend about how a growing percentage of homeowners insurance claims are being closed without payment. One of the themes was that carriers appear to be taking a harder look at claims than they did years ago, whether that's because of higher deduct...
I have a house I am currently making into an Air BNB, but I want to start buying duplexes, triplex, etc to build my portfolio.
Every property manager needs to be managed. PMs are the most frustrating thing about the business, because even the best PM won’t be as effective as a skilled owner-operator. In a tight market where cashflow can be tough to come by, it’s the PM factor which puts most deals out of reach for invest...
Everyone’s so worried about being house poor… I don’t know anyone house poor, do you? What I see people get wrong more of the time… And yes, I’m talking mostly to my business owning friends who are in a strong financial position … bet on yourself. Go the extra mile and get a home that keeps you u...
I was wondering how other real estate investors or property managers around the area find and vet their contractors?
I came across an article this morning about Cape Town considering rules that would treat some short-term rentals more like commercial hospitality properties than residential homes. What caught my attention is that this doesn’t feel all that different from the direction parts of the U.S. already s...
Here's the number one problem with underwriting deals too conservatively. Fear will keep a would-be investor stuck in analysis paralysis forever. As an agent who works primarily with investors, it's not my job to convince someone to invest. If you don't want to own real estate, that's totally fin...
I have a tenant whom I allowed to have a dog in my unit due to it being an ESA animal. That dog then died. I then let them replace it with two cats, non-ESA animals. They now "asked for my opinion" on them getting a dog. I do not want this, as two cats are enough in my opinion, but I know that th...
July 4th is almost here. Anyone who owns rentals or STRs long enough probably ends up with at least one fireworks story. Tenant stories, guest stories, near disasters, neighbor incidents, all of it. What’s the craziest one you’ve seen?
I am currently looking at renting one of my houses and getting several applicants for section 8. What are the pros and cons?? What due diligence do you recommend for a landlord??